Skift Take
Forced by the pandemic, the travel industry is at an inflection point. After a decade-long bender of growth, it's facing multiple crises and an uncertain future. Can the organization that's tasked with representing the global commercial travel industry adapt to the new challenge?
The Covid-19 pandemic caught much of the travel industry on the backfoot. As it mercilessly unfolds through 2020, it is shining a bright light on the existing strengths and weaknesses across the travel industry — many of which existed long before the pandemic profoundly changed our lives.
Nowhere has this been more clear than with the World Travel and Tourism Council. The non-profit membership organization created three decades ago has certainly fought to regain traveler confidence through past crises, including health scares.
But it’s fair to say that Covid-19 has eclipsed events like SARS and 9/11 by several orders of magnitude. At a generationally defining moment — when the travel industry needs one cohesive voice more than ever before — the organization's attempt at a response has left some to wonder if it is capable of doing anything other than cheerleading for the travel industry's growth, particularly mass tourism, and whether it is out of touch with a new generation’s needs and beliefs.
That response, according to both on and off-the-record conversations Skift conducted over the past month, was marked by a confusing lack of coordination with the United Nations World Tourism Organization, an underestimation of just how fragmented and unwieldy the travel industry has become, and an assumption that the pre-pandemic growth trajectory was undoubtedly the one the industry should want back.
As a membership organization, clubby WTTC was conceived as a way to lobby for the industry’s economic interests, at a time when it struggled to assert itself as a unified industry at all.
In many ways that problem still persists: The travel industry is still six to eight industries trying to operate as one on a global scale. But thanks, in part, to the council’s work, the industry’s status as an economic powerhouse has become plain to see over the past decade. As WTTC is so often known to cite: Pre-pandemic, travel and tourism accounted for 10.3 percent of global gross domestic product, and supported one in 10 jobs worldwide.
People can disagree about whether the global travel industry will regain its prior economic might post-Covid. But what can’t rationally be denied are the existential challenges facing the travel industry over the next decade, from the climate emergency to political protectionism. Thanks to the pandemic, the growth-assured industry that WTTC has lobbied for over the last 10 years currently does not exist. The dec
